What is Magma? An open-source project for building mobile networks

This month's column was co-written by Amar Padmanabhan, a lead developer of Magma, the open-source project for creating carrier-grade networks; and Bruce Davie, a member of the project's technical advisory committee. Discussions about mobile and wireless networking seem to attract buzzwords, especially with the transition to …

[Anonymous Coward]

Terrific article - and it gives me a lot of generic architectural ideas to pilfer and reapply (patterns, if you will.)

[Robert Grant]

It'd be interesting to hear why this was built as a k8s-alternative, rather than as custom operators built on k8s directly. Timing? Too different a domain? NIH?

[JetSetJim]

Questions

Interesting concept, although I wonder how each of the thousands of radio nodes are configured with the very long list of possible core network nodes to use. Not sure how many vendors support that at present, even if multiple nodes are supported. Last I saw, which may have been a while ago(!), most address a single box (per MNO hosted?) which may then contain a bunch of servers that are load balanced in a similar fashion.

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you buy a "cloud solution" from this person? Maybe not!

Quote: "....networks can deploy hundreds of access gateways around radio towers instead of adding a few large boxes..."

Quote: "....the impact of component failure is limited: only the UEs served by a given access gateway are impacted...."

*

So......I'm in the middle of restoring a backup from "the cloud" and the local connection to "the cloud" is disrupted........I'm still screwed!!

Not only that, my local restore image is most likely screwed as well. Yup.....you say "the impact of component failure is limited".....doesn't do me any good at all!!

So tell me.......why is "the cloud" any improvement at all over more traditional approaches? Once upon a time, most of the risk factors WERE IN MY SCOPE TO MANAGE!!! In this scenario, I have NO CONTROL over network availability, no control over "cloud availability".........

....and when things go t*ts up, I don't know who to call or who is responsible for fixing the failure.

Now tell me that this "cloud" solution is worth buying! Sorry.....I really don't think so!!!

[Caver_Dave]

Re: Would you buy a "cloud solution" from this person? Maybe not!

Get a totally integrated system from a commercial supplier (e.g. Wind River) that has been rolled out for some time at multiple Telco's.

[amanfromMars 1]

Failsafe? I don’t think so.

To ponder on the vulnerabilities and weaknesses which exist for exploitation of and degradation on the Magma Cloud Native Architecture model, and how such would be explored, one only needs to visualise/virtualise the model with the following label substitutions ......

Federation Gateway ............... Prime Minister

Orchestrator ..................... Cabinet

Distributed Access Gateways ...... Parliament

Radio Access Network ............. User Equipment

..... and as easily as that well known democratically elected private/pirate/publicised body is able to be nobbled/subverted/infiltrated, so be it similarly facilitated with regard to the Magma Cloud Native Architecture model via mirroring means and memes.